A mission coordinator approach for a fleet of UAVs in urban scenarios

Abstract The use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) is now common, but although they have been for various applications, there are still a lot of challenges that need to be overcome. One key issue is related to standardizing the use of these vehicles in urban environments and guaranteeing a minimum risk level for the population. To rise to these challenges, autonomous strategies that optimize and coordinate vehicles in cooperative missions and avoid human operators should be developed. The novelty of this paper is the development of an autonomous urban mission coordinator, which is responsible for the high-level logistics of a fleet of heterogeneous vehicles. A multi-variable weighted algorithm based on a tree optimization method is also proposed.